Theology for
beginners
Oct. –Nov.
2007-10-01
Christology
-
Christology in O.T. and N.T.
- We
believe in one God ( The Holy
Trinity )
- We
believe in one Lord Jesus Christ.
- Jesus God
and Man.
- Jesus one
Person in Divine and human natures
- Salvation
through Jesus Christ.
Fr. Michael J.
Bazzi
.................................................................
كريستولوجيا: دراسة عن شخص يسوع
ت1 –ت2 -2007
1- الكريستولوجيا
فى الكتاب المقدس (العهد القديم والجديد)
2- نؤمن باله واحد
ضابط الكل (الثالوث الأقدس)
3- وبرب واحد يسوع
المسيح ابن الله الوحيد
4- يسوع المسيح
اله وانسان فى ان واحد
5- يسوع المسيح
شخص واحد فى طبيعتين ( الالهية
والانسانية)
6- لا خلاص الا
بيسوع
المسيح
القس
ميخائيل بزي
Theology for
Beginners
Oct.03, 2007
CHRISTOLOGY
God
Became Man
The supreme truth
about the savior, for which the chosen
people were wholly prepared, was that he
was God. To effect the redemption of the
world, God became man. The inner meaning
of God’s plan, what made it redemptive,
we shall not discuss yet. When we have
seen what he did, we shall be in a
better position to grasp how it met the
situation created by Adam’s first sin,
and worsened by all the sins with which
men hastened to follow Adam’s. we must
concentrate our attention upon what
actually happened.
God became man. Not the Trinity, but
the second person of the Trinity, the
Son, the Word became man. Reread the
opening verses of St. John’s Gospel. “In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God. All
things were made by him….And the Word
was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”
Here we find the fact-that it was the
second person who became man. And we
find the reason-“all things were made by
him.”
Glance back at page 39, where
appropriation is discussed. Creation as
a work of omnipotence, bringing
something into existence of nothing, is
appropriated to God the Father. But the
order of the universe, as a work of
wisdom, is appropriated to the Son. The
order has been wrecked, and a new order
must be made; it was the Son who made
it.
To make it, he became man. Read the
first chapter of St. Matthew and the
first two of St. Luke. A virgin, Mary,
conceived a son; at the time, she was
betrothed, and soon after was married,
to Joseph, a carpenter. The child thus
conceived was God the Son. The second
person of the Trinity, already and
externally existent in his own divine
nature, now took human nature in Mary’s
womb.
His conception was virginal; he had a
human mother but no human father; that
which in ordinary conception is produced
by the action of the father was in this
instance was produced by a miracle of
the power of God. He grew in the womb
like any other child, and in due course
was born into our world in Bethlehem,
near Jerusalem. He was named Jesus, and
came to be called Christ, which means
the Anointed.
Of the next thirty years of his life we
know little. When he was twelve occurred
the only incident we are told-namely,
his separation from his parents and
their finding him in the Temple (Lk
2:44-51). He was a carpenter, in
Nazareth, further north in Galilee. Then
came the three years of his public life.
He traveled over Palestine with the
twelve followers he had chosen, the
Apostles. He preached of God and man, of
the Kingdom, and of himself as its
founder; by every kind of miracle, of
healing especially, he showed that God
was guaranteeing the truth of his
utterance. He was unsparing in his
denunciation of the sinfulness of the
religious leaders of the Jewish people.
They could only want his death, and he
gave them the pretext on which, in the
name of true religion, they might kill
him. For he claimed to be, not Messiah
only, but God.
Upon a charge of blasphemy, they
persuaded the Roman governor of Judea to
crucify him.
He was nailed to a cross on a hill
called Calvary for three hours until he
died. He was buried, and on the third
day he rose again. For forty days more
he appeared among his Apostles, then
ascended into the sky until a cloud hid
him from their gaze. In his death,
resurrection, and ascension mankind is
redeemed. That is the story of our
redemption in barest outline. We must
try to see its meaning, or as much of
its meaning as is graspable this side of
death.
The first step is to pierce as deep as
we may into the being of Christ our
Lord. And for this we must read the
Gospels. The newcomer to theology, even
if he is not a newcomer to Gospel
reading, should at this point in his
study do what G.K. Chesterton advised-he
should embark upon a reading of the
Gospels as though we had never read
them before, almost indeed as
though he had never heard the story
before. He must make the considerable
effort to read what is there.
Two things especially make it difficult
for us to read what is there. The first
is extreme brevity of the four accounts.
They are intensely concentrated, packed
with meaning. We must learn to read them
slowly, comparing one part with another,
trying to see what they narrate
or describe, living them as we read
them.
The second is that we think we know it
already. This can be a real obstacle to
our hearing what the Gospels are
actually saying. We flip through the
first and second chapter of St. Luke
with a vague memory of Christmas cribs,
Christmas carols, and Christmas cards.
We move as inattentively through the
first four accounts of the passion and
death of Our Lord with the feeling that
we have been through it all a thousand
times in the Sorrowful Mysteries of the
Rosary.
Above all, we bring to the reading the
popular picture of Our Lord as a nice
kind man, easily pushed around, always
turning the other cheek, happiest when
patting small children’s heads. So
strong a grip has this imaginary
portrait that it can prevent us meeting
the strong and complex Christ who is
actually there.
Our Lord as we Meet Him
We must read, then, with the
determination to meet Our Lord for
ourselves, as he is. A reader coming
wholly new to the story, not even
thinking he had heard it before, would
certainly become aware, after a while,
of what I may call a double stream
both of word and action. At times Our
lord is speaking and acting simply as
man-a great man, an extraordinary man,
but not more than a man. But at other
times he says things and does things
that go beyond the human; what he says
and does is either a claim to be
superhuman, or is utterly meaningless.
Nor will the word “superhuman” long
suffice. He says things that only God
could say, do things that only God could
do.
I shall attempt to illustrate this
double stream in detail.
To get real value from the experience,
each one should live through it for
himself in the Gospels. In a way he will
be living through the anguished
questioning of the Apostles in the years
they were with him. At one moment they
felt he must be more than man; the
feeling would fade only to return
stronger, and perhaps fade again, but
always revive.
Our Lord does not tell them at the
beginning. The truth that the carpenter
with whom they now lived so familiarly,
whom they saw hungry and thirsty and
weary, was the God by whom all things
were made, was not one to be tossed
casually to them or hurled violently at
them. These men truly believed in God,
had God’s infinite majesty as the very
background of all their lives. They must
be made ready to receive the truth
which, presented too suddenly, would
have shattered them.
So Our Lord does not tell them at once.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that
he brings them to the point where they
tell him – to Peter’s “Thou are the
Christ, the Son of the Living God” (Mt
16:16), to Thomas’s “My Lord and my God”
(Jn 20:28). Yet, from time to time, he
did make statements which could only be
a claim to be God.
Quite early came “No one knows the Son
but the Father and no one knows the
Father but the Son” (Mt 11:27; Lk
10:22). This is a statement of equality
(and if you glance back at the section
on the Blessed Trinity, you will see
that it is precisely the Father’s
knowledge which generates the Son). Here
and there as the story proceeds come
other statements-note especially,
“Before Abraham was made, I am” (Jn
8:58), and “The Father and I are one”
(Jn 10:30)
The Apostles heard these things—heard
him forgiving sins and supplementing the
law God had given to Moses, always as
one having in himself total authority;
saw the miracles which were the divine
guarantee of his message. Yet they
hesitated.
Knowing the answer we may tend to marvel
at their slowness. But, as so often
happens, what kept them from the answer
was that they phrased the question
wrongly. They came to ask, “was he man
or was he god?” so much evidence for
each possibility, and how were they to
know that he was both? Who would have
known that as a possibility, if it had
not happened? What indeed does it mean,
that one person should be man and god?
The theology of he Incarnation must be
our next consideration, what It means
that the Word became flesh. Never think
of this as mere theology, a proper
occupation for learned men, but too
remote for us. Until we have entered
deeply into it, we shall not understand
anything our lord said or did; we shall
not have the beginning of Our own
redemption.
Christ: God and Man
Understanding what Christ is ----in so
far as a beginning of understanding may
be made here below---is essential to
understanding what he does. We can, of
course, decide no to bother with
understanding, to build our whole
spiritual life upon love and obedience.
This attitude may be at best profound
intellectual humility, at worst total
intellectual unconcern. Either way it is
impoverishment, a refusal of nourishment
which the soul should have. To be
willing to die for the truth that Christ
is God is a glorious thing, but there is
no glory in holding the phrase simply as
a phrase, the riches in it never made
our own.
Christ was a carpenter, the sort of man
whom any of he neighbors could have
called upon to make a plough or a door
frame. There was one such in every
village of Palestine. What was special
about this one is that at the same he
was infinite God, who had made all
things of nothing (including the
customer whose order he was executing,
including indeed his own body and soul),
who enlightened every man that came into
this world. To say as much as this is to
speak a mystery. We must begin to know
what we are saying.
The key to our making the reality our
own lies in the distinction between
person and nature. At this point it
would be a good idea to reread pages
28-31, where these terms are examined
for the light shed upon the doctrine of
the Trinity. We may repeat some points
of the distinction here. The nature
anything has decides what it is. To take
the example closest to us, we who
possess a human nature, a union of
spiritual soul and matter, are men. But
nature, though it answers the question
what, does not answer the
question who. Inn every
rational nature there is a mysterious
something which says “I”—that
is the person (and this is true not only
for man, but for every angel, and as we
have seen, for God himself). That which
says “I” is the person is the answer to
the question who any rational
being is.
There is further distinction. Nature
decides what a being can do; but the
person does it. My soul and body make
all sorts of actions possible to me, but
I do them. Whatever is done, suffered,
experienced in a rational nature is
done, suffered, experienced by the
person whose nature it is.
Left to ourselves, we might simply
assume that each person has one nature;
each nature (if it happens to be
rational) has one person. We have
already seen how wrong we should be if
we made that assumption; it is simply
one more way of treating man as the
measure of all. In God there is one
nature, totally possessed by three
distinct persons. The plurality of
persons over nature is reversed in
Christ Our Lord, for in him the person
is one, the natures are two.
That one person who in Christ said “I”
is the second person of the Blessed
Trinity, God the Son, God the Word.
Christ is not the first person or the
third or all three (in their profound
way theologians have discussed all these
theoretical possibilities for an
Incarnation different from Christ’s). We
have already seen why, when the first
order of creation was wrecked, it fell
to God the Son to make the new order. To
make it he became man; he who from
eternity possessed he divine nature did,
at a point of time, take to himself and
make his own a human nature, a body
conceived of a woman, a soul specially
created by God as our souls were.
Because Christ our Lord, uniquely, had
two natures, he could give two answers
to question ‘What are you?” _ for nature
decides what a person is. And he had two
distinct principles, sources we may say,
of action. By the one nature he could do
all that goes with being God_ he could
read the heart of man, for instance; he
could raise Lazarus to life. By the
other he could do all that belongs to
being man _ he could be born of a
mother, could hunger and thirst, could
suffer, and could die.
But whether he was doing the things of
God or the things of man, it was always
the person who did them. Actions are
always done by the person, and in him
there was but one person. Everything he
did down to the smallest, in itself most
commonplace, human act_ was done by God.
Every single action of Christ was the
action of the second person of the
Blessed Trinity, and this includes every
action done by him in his human nature.
For natures are sources of action, but
not doers. It is always the person who
does them, and in his human nature there
was but one single person, and that
person God. There was no human person,
for that would have made him two people,
each with his own distinct nature. His
human nature was complete. But it was
united to a divine person, not a human
person. He who said" I" in it was God,
not man.
We may make this clearer by glancing at
two great Christian truths_ Mary was the
mother of God, God died upon the cross.
I remember the first time a
street-corner heckler said to me: "If
Mary was the mother of God, she must
have existed before God." I was a
newcomer to the outdoor work of the
Catholic Evidence Guild, and I simply
gaped at him. In a superior voice he
went on:" You realize, of course, or
don't you, that mothers come before
sons?" The immediate answer, though I
didn't handle the question very
brilliantly at the time, is that mothers
must exist before their sons are born;
and Our Blessed Lady did exist before
the second person of the Trinity was
born into human nature; that this one
Son already existed in his divine nature
does not alter the truth that it was in
her womb that he was conceived as man,
from her womb born into our world. His
eternal existence as Son of his heavenly
Father does not by one jot diminish what
she gave him. There is nothing received
by any human being from his mother which
he did not receive from her.
There are spiritual souls outside the
Church which find it unbearable that a
woman should be mother of God: for many
such the way of escape is to speak of
her as mother of the human nature of
Christ. But natures do not have mothers.
He who was born of her as man was God
the Son. She was as totally his mother
as yours is yours or mine is mine.
The other truth we shall consider in
this connection is that God died upon
the cross. Here again I am reminded of
another street-corner question of about
the same vintage: "You say that God died
upon the cross; what happened to the
universe while God was dead?" The
suggestion is made that it was not God
who died on the Calvary, but the
humanity of Christ. But in death, it is
always someone who dies, a person; and
upon Calvary's cross, only one person
hung. God the Son in the manhood that
was his.
Thus it was God the Son who died_not, of
course, in his divine nature, which
cannot know death and which holds the
universe in existence, but in the human
nature which was so utterly his. Death,
remember, does not for any one of us
mean annihilation. It means the
separation of soul and body, a
separation at the Last Judgment will be
ended. Upon Calvary, the body that was
God the Son's was separated from the
soul that was likewise his. And on the
third day thereafter they were united
again. In his human nature God the Son
rose from the death which in his human
nature had been his.
In our reading of the Gospels, it is
vital that we should never forget that
every word uttered and action performed
by Christ is uttered and performed by
God the Son. With the words, perhaps
even more than with the actions, we
shall find sayings we are often tempted
to call hard. The one person said "I,"
in the divine nature and in the human
nature, in an infinite nature and a
finite nature. He could say," I and the
Father are one"; he could say, "The
father is greater than I"; he could
say," Father, if it be your will let
this cup pass from me"; he could say,"
My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?"_ It is the same person uttering the
truth of distinct natures, but asserting
each nature as truly his own.
We shall look further into this,
meanwhile note that one value of reading
the Gospel as I have urged is the new
light the reading will cast for us upon
God himself. We tend to think of the
truth "Christ is God" as a piece of
information about Christ, and so it is.
But we shall suffer loss if we fail to
see it also as information about God.
Apart form it, we should know God as far
as our minds are capable of seizing him,
in his own divine nature. We should know
him, for instance, as creator of all
things from nothing. Although this is
true, it is just a little remote, since
we have no experience of creating
anything from nothing. But reading the
Gospel we see God in our nature, coping
with our world, meeting situations known
to us. Outside Christianity there is
nothing to compare with the intimacy of
this knowledge. It is ours for the
having. It is a wonderful thing to see
God being God, so to speak; but there is
a special excitement in seeing God being
man.
The manhood
The second person of the Trinity became
man. Grasp the precision of this. He did
not take human nature as a mask which,
when the play was over, he would
triumphantly strip off. He is man is
heaven and everlastingly. Nor did he
simply take the appearance of a man,
like the angel who guided Tobias. He did
not take humanity like a garment that he
could wear or an instrument that he
could use. It was not simply that there
were certain things he had to do which
required that he must have a human body
and human soul at his disposal, and that
once these things were done the whole
point of having them would cease.
He became man. He is as truly entitled
to the name as we are. As we read the
Gospels, there is one single element
which might make us wonder if he were
wholly man_ He does not sin. He himself
challenges: "Who shall convict me of
sin?"; and the Epistle to the Hebrews
can say (4:15) he was "tempted in all
things like as we are, without sin," or,
in Monsignor Knox's translation:" He had
been through every trial, fashioned as
we are, only sinless." But sin is not a
way of being man; it is a way of
misusing manhood. We misuse ours often
enough; he never misused his. So he was
more completely man than we.
This completeness has been a profound
trouble to great numbers of Christians.
To them it was a beginning of trouble
that God should have become man at all,
but somehow they accepted it_ always
with the feeling that he did not really
do it in its totality. Somehow they felt
that the dignity of God would be
safeguarded by some want of completeness
in the humanity he assumed. Thus very
early the Docetists taught that his body
was only an appearance, whereas St.
Peter had said (1 Pt 2:24), "Who his own
self bore our sins in his body upon the
Tree." But the Docetists were only a
kind of crude beginning. What really
started heresy after heresy was the
desire to escape, not from Our Lord's
body, but from his soul.
There were those who said that he had no
human soul, his divinity performing the
functions of a soul in the body where in
he redeemed us. The Church remembered
the terrible phrase he uttered in the
Garden of Gethsemane: "My soul is
sorrowful even unto death." May more
people admitting the soul, denied it
intellect or will. Both these faculties
are worth a closer look, if we are to
grasp at once the completeness and the
mysteriousness of our Lord's humanity.
As God, Christ Our Lord was omniscient,
he knew all things, and his knowledge
was infinite. What could such a person
do with a finite intellect, which would
only learn some tiny fraction of the
things he already knew? In fact he did,
and did with joy, all that could be done
with it, for he was truly man. His body
was real, and his senses were real;
through them the external world made its
way to his brain very much as it does to
ours; and his human intellect proceeded
to work upon their evidence as human
intellects are meant to. The person who
in one nature knew all things did, at
St. Luke tell us; in the other nature
grow in wisdom. Technically this is
called experimental knowledge; in
addition, the Church tells us, he had by
God's gift two other ways of knowing:
infused knowledge, of the kind the
prophets had, God forming directly in
their minds knowledge needed for the
work he has sent them to do; and the
Beatific Vision, the direct knowledge of
God we shall all have in heaven. Observe
that both are kinds of knowledge that
the human soul can receive.
Towards the end of the fifth century the
Monothelites began to teach that while
Our Lord had a human intellect, he had
no human will. (This was the heresy
which cause a Council of the Church to
condemn Pope Honorious_after his death_
for not condemning it with due vigor.)
In a sense it is simply another form of
the objection against Our Lord's finite
intellect. He himself answered it in
Gethsemane when he prayed to his
father," Nor my will but thine be done."
There was never disharmony between the
finite will and the infinite, but one
was not the other.
The real horror of this heresy, little
as its adherents saw it, is that it
would mean that the human heart of
Christ lacked the power to love. For
love is act of the will; and whatever
mystery there may be in imagining a
person with an infinite intellect and a
finite, an infinite will and a finite,
it is simply mystery. It does not
horrify us like the bleakness of a human
soul that could not love.
We have begun to think of the love of
our Lord's human soul. It was, as human
love must be to be wholly itself, love
of God and love of man. The Gospels are
filled with both.
What needs to be said about this love of
man can be said quickly_ it is the one
thing that every Christian knows about
him, in fact that everyone knows about
him. But we have seen earlier a common
misunderstanding. He is not a merely
amiable person who goes round telling
people he loves them. In fact, he hardly
ever tells anyone that. There is not a
trace of sentimentality in him, no sugar
at all. His speech is abrupt, realistic,
not often melting. It was not from his
speech that men learned his love for
them; it was above all from his actions.
But learn it they did; and it was one of
his disciples who uttered what is
perhaps the most wonderful phrase of all
religion, "God is love." St. John was
combining the two truths he had come to
know, that Christ is God and Christ is
love.
What will startle the reader coming new
to the Gospels is the intensity of Our
Lord's devotion to his Father in heaven.
The first words recorded of him are,"
Did you not know that I must be about my
Father's business?" his last words on
the cross were," Father, into thy hands
I commend my spirit." He speaks to or of
his Father scores of times. more than
once we are told that he went apart from
the Apostles to pray to his heavenly
Father.
Here we come to the third form of a
difficulty which we have already
considered twice. How can a person pray,
when he is himself God? Every act of Our
Lord, whether in the divine nature or
the human, was the act of the person
that he was. When Christ prayed, it was
the second person of the Trinity who
prayed. And prayer is, of its very
essence, the utterance of finite
creature to the infinite God. Once again
we face mystery, yet some small gleam of
light we can get. It is the function,
the duty of a person to utter his
nature; having taken and made his own a
human nature, God the Son must utter it,
and this includes uttering its adoration
and thanksgiving and petition. But
realize that though it was truly human
prayer, it could not be simply as the
prayer of men who are no more than men.
Our Lord could teach his Apostles to
pray; but we do not find him praying
with them.
Because he had a real soul and a real
body, Our Lord had real emotions too.
Love, for instance, can be perfectly
real simply as the total turning of the
will to the good of others, without
having any emotional accompaniment.
Angels, we are told, love like that. But
it is an odd man who has never known the
emotion of love, a man, in that at
least, not like Our Lord. He loved, and
must have shown his love, since one of
his disciples_St. John_ is especially
"the disciple whom Jesus loved"; and one
gets a strong sense of his love for the
family at Bethany. Lazarus and Martha
and Mary.
He wept too_ not only over dead Lazarus
but over Jerusalem. And he could storm
in anger. The long attack quoted by St.
Matthew (ch 23) upon the Pharisees is
the very high point of invective,
stimulating perhaps to us who are not
Pharisees, but terrifying to every man
who has ever examined his own
conscience.
The temptation is to continue with the
man we meet in the Gospels. Let us
consider one final question which in a
way is a summarization of what we have
been discussing. What does a person who
is God do with a human soul?
Clearly he does with it all that can be
done with it, using every power it has
to the uttermost of its possibility. And
that is something that no merely human
person has ever done. Most of us use our
minds when we have to, under compulsion
so to speak, and not very brilliantly.
The geniuses of our race are a constant
reminder of our own mediocrity. But not
the greatest genius does all with his
soul that can, by the uttermost use of
its own possibilities, be done. In fact,
men do show a certain development in
their realization of the human soul's
possibilities; there have been very
considerable advances in the last
hundred years in the understanding of
the mind's powers. Men have glimpsed the
possibilities of a profounder control,
for instance, of soul over body. Our
Lord had to wait for none of this, for
he had made that soul of his, and it had
no hidden surprises for him. He knew
what it could do.
He could do all that could be done with
his human soul_ but not more. We have
seen that man's destiny is to do
something which by nature he cannot do_
see the face of God. He cannot do it,
not because his own use of his nature is
defective, but because unaided human
nature cannot do it. That superb, that
incomparable soul of Christ was given
sanctifying grace. It was indwelt by the
Holy Spirit, so that indwelling became a
new thing. And that is the indwelling
which is ours.
Redemption
Suffering
and Death
Once we have come to some understanding
of who and what the Redeemer is, we are
in a better condition to see into the
meaning of the redemption.
For the state from which humanity needed
to be redeemed it would be well to
reread the section on the Fall of Man.
Here we may summarize briefly the
principal element in it. Owing to sin
and its origin, the race had lost its
union with God; a breach lay between.
Where God and man had been at one, they
were now at two: till at-one-ment,
atonement, was made, heaven was closed
to the race's members.
God could, of course, have simply
written off the race as a failure. He
could, as simply, have forgiven the sin.
He did neither. He chose that the sin
committed in human nature should be
expiated in human nature.
For the act by which Christ redeemed us
was a wholly human act. The life he
offered as sacrifice was his human life;
an offering of the divine life would
have been meaningless. The suffering was
in his soul and body; the death was the
separation of his soul and body.
In him, humanity gave its all, holding
back nothing. Here was a total obedience
as against the disobedience of man's
sin, a total acceptance and
self-surrender as against the thrust and
self-assertion of man's sin. And all
this was wholly in human nature.
But he who preformed the act was God.
Actions, we have seen, are always in the
nature, but the person does them; and
the person whose human nature this was,
in whose human nature all this was done,
was, is, God the Son. Because he was
truly man, his sacrifice was truly
human, so that it could be set against
the sin of the race. But because he was
God, his act had an infinite value, by
which it compensated, outweighed, not
only all the sin men ever had committed
but all they ever could. That, in
essence, is why it is redemptive.
Every act of Christ was infinite in
value because he who performed it was
God. Why then did he offer his death and
not some lesser act_ the tears, for
example, that he shed over Jerusalem? It
is always perilous to think one knows
why God does one thing and not another.
His ways are unsearchable, our mind is
not his.
But the least we can say that had he
chosen some offering less than his life,
there would have been a permanent
feeling in the mind of man_ not
dissatisfaction exactly, but not total
satisfaction either. We should have been
left with the sense that in our
redemption Christ's human nature had
played only a token part, leaving the
infinity of the divine person to do the
whole work. Whereas he chose that his
human nature should give its all,
leaving the person to provide only the
infinite value which human nature by
itself never could provide.
Observe the words "he chose." No man
could inflict death upon him against his
will. He says that he will "lay down"
his life for his sheep. "I am laying
down my life to take it up again
afterwards. Nobody can for me of it; I
lay it down of my own accord" (Jn
10:17-18). He did not choose that men
should slay him, of course. But since
men willed to slay him because he had
fearlessly spoken the word of God
against them, he chose to let them do
the worst that was in them. Through
love, he himself would be the victim
offered in sacrifice; they would slay
him, he would offer his death for the
sins of all men, including his slayers.
It is essential at this point to reread
what Matthew (ch 26), Mark (ch 14), and
Luke (ch 22) have to tell us of the
Agony in the Garden. In Luke (22:37) we
have the key to an understanding of what
was to happen there and on Calvary.
Jesus says a phrase of Isaiah_ "He was
numbered among the malefactors"_ must be
fulfilled in him. It was a way of
referring to the whole passage in which
the phrase occurred. So we read Isaiah
53_ a short chapter in which we came
upon "Despised and the most abject of
men, a man of sorrows …..he has borne
our infirmities and carried our
sorrow…he was wounded for our
iniquities, he was bruised for our sins;
the chastisement of our peace was upon
him and by his bruises we are
healed…..The Lord has laid upon him the
iniquity of us all. He was offered
because it was his own will, and he
opened not his mouth; he shall be led as
a sheep to the slaughter."
He would take upon himself the sins of
men that the offering he made of himself
might be real expiation. In Gethsemane
we get some glimpse of what the taking
meant to him. For nothing he does is
fiction or pretence. He could not make
his own the guilt of other men's sins,
for guilt can be only in the sinner. But
he took the burden of them, the weight_
above all, the weight of the sorrow that
we, all men, should have felt for our
sins and have not felt. It all but
killed him.
He prayed to his Father, "Let this cup
pass from me, yet not my will be done
but yours." He was praying to be spared
not torture and crucifixion but the
weight of all humanity's sinfulness,
including your and mine.
His Father, answering his agonized
prayer, sent an angel "to comfort him"_
"comfort" meaning "strengthen." For that
hour he lived. Death waited for Calvary.
Passion,
Resurrection, and Ascension
In the ordinary of the Mass a grouping
of words occur which, unless we realize
that no word is wasted, we might simply
take it our stride, not noticing the
remarkable thing it is saying. (I for
one thus took it in my stride for thirty
years or thereabouts.)
After the consecration the priest says
that we offer the sacrifice in memory,
not of Christ's passion only, but also
of his Resurrection from the grave and,
as well, of his glorious Ascension into
heaven.
The Resurrection is not simply a sign
that one man has conquered death; the
Ascension is not simply a way of letting
the Apostles know that their Christ had
really left this world. Both have their
function, along with Calvary, in our
redemption. Both belong to the
completeness of the sacrifice by which
the breach between the race and God was
healed, grace was made available in a
new abundance and a new richness, heaven
was opened to the members of the race.
Let us pause a moment upon this
Sacrifice. For us it is of all actions
the highest, since by it our race was
redeemed. From the beginning, men,
though they did not know what ultimately
would be wrought by it, had yet seen
sacrifice as the highest act of
religion. It was a public act, performed
by one for the people; by it something
was withdrawn from man's personal use,
made sacred, offered to God in
profession that all that man had was
God's.
Of course, that a man should offer is
not the whole story; unless God approves
and accepts, all is vain. There were
occasions in the Old Testament where God
showed his approval publicly _as by
sending fire from heaven upon the
offering.
But only in the supreme sacrifice of our
redemption does God show his approval
and acceptance publicly, totally. In
restoring him to life, God gives the
visible sign that the priest who offered
his own body and blood in a sacrifice
was wholly pleasing to him .In the
Ascension God shows visibly that he is
actually taking to himself that which
has been offered to Him.
Christ Ascends to his Father, to be with
him forever, with the marks of his
sacrifice still in his body, but now
glorious_ the everlasting reminder that
man's sin has been expiated, that the
breach has been closed between God and
men that they are again, as they were in
the beginning, at one. So the Epistle to
the Hebrews (7:25) shows Christ in
heaven, "ever living to make
intercession for us."
At the Last Supper, Our Lord had told
the Apostles that he must go; and,
answering their anguish, he gives as the
all sufficient reason that if he does
not go, the Holy Spirit will not come.
For Christ, everything is in that. The
order broken by Adam's sin has been
reestablished, or rather, a better order
has been established; that was for the
second person. Now is the time for such
a rich flowing of gifts as the souls of
men have never known. And gifts are the
fruit of love, and so are appropriated
to the third person, who within the
Blessed Trinity is the uttered love of
the first person and the second.
At the Last Supper Christ had promised
his followers that when he went to the
Father, he would send the Holy Spirit.
At the Ascension, on the point of going
to the Father, he told them to return to
Jerusalem, and await the Holy Spirit's
coming: who ten days later descended
upon them_ on Pentecost (the word means
"fiftieth," summing the forty days from
Resurrection to Ascension, and the ten
days from that).
Before proceeding to the great question
of how we are to be made partakers of
Christ's redemptive act, we may cast a
brief glance at the vanquished in the
great conflict fought upon Calvary, the
one who had been victorious in that
first conflict in the dawn of our
history_ Satan.
It has already been noted that as the
Passion draws near, Our Lord is
continually conscious of the Enemy,
mentioning Satan again and again. Satan
was conscious of Christ too, but he did
not know Christ as Christ knew him. It
is ironical that he rushed upon his
defeat_ for, we are told by St. Luke and
St. John, and it was he who moved Judas
to betray the Lord to his slayers.
Truth, Life, Union
At the Last Supper Our Lord uttered the
words which are at once the formula of
our redemption, and the charter of his
Church. "I am the way and the truth and
the life. No man comes unto the Father
but by me."
It is possible to have known and loved
the phrase all one's life, yet not have
given much actual thought to what it
contains; there is so much splendor in
the saying that one may fail to grasp
what is being said. To anyone whose
experience this has so far been, it will
be valuable to pause now and make his
own examination of those superb words,
before going on to read mine.
A first thought may be of wonder why, if
Our Lord is the Way, there is need for
more; why are truth and life added? If
he is the Way, when you have found him
you have found all. But the two
additional words are there to challenge
us. With them we are face to face with
reality at one frightening and
stimulation. It is the reality St. Paul
expressed: "Work out your salvation with
fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12).
Salvation is not handed to us on a dish;
in no sense is it a laborsaving device.
What Christ does for men are what men
cannot do for themselves, not what they
can; what they can, they should. To have
found the way is not the end; it is the
beginning. The way is not the goal. Only
the goal is, for us, permanence; the way
may be lost.
We might lose the way, as we might lose
any way, either by wandering from it
through error, or by lacking the
strength for the effort_ the "fear and
trembling"_ which following it to the
end demands. As against the danger of
losing the way we need truth. As against
the danger of falling by the wayside we
need life_ Our Lord came that we might
have life "and more abundantly" (Jn
10:10)_ the life of sanctifying grace.
And what in any event does Our Lord mean
by calling himself the Way? We have just
heard the answer: "No man comes unto the
Father but by me." It is in union with
him, and only so, that men come to that
everlasting union with God which is
their destiny.
Salvation then involves truth, life,
union with God_ Man.
How
these are to be ours he tells in the
words he utters on a mountain in Galilee
between his rising from the dead and his
rising into heaven t present the
sacrifice of our salvation before the
throne of God. To the Apostles_ the
eleven still with him_ he says: "Go and
teach all nations; baptizing them in the
name of the Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Spirit; teaching them to
observe all things whatsoever I have
commanded. And behold I am with you all
days even to the end of the world" (Mt
28:19-20).
Observe how closely this
follows the great formula of the Last
Supper truth, life, union
Jesus Christ.
The great Christological text of
St. Paul
is found in Ph 2:5-11. Here the
preexistent Christ is in the form of God
and equal with God; the incarnation is
an emptying of Himself and the
assumption of the form of a salve_ a
very probable allusion to the servant of
the Lord_ humiliation and obedience to
death by crucifixion. As a result of His
mission, God has glorified Him and given
Him the name of Jesus, a title of
adoration, and a confession that Jesus
is Lord. This one passage sums up the
principal themes of Pauline and even of
NT Christology. The transcendence of
Jesus, so clear in this passage, is more
apparent in the Pauline writings than it
is in the Gospels; but A. Feuillet has
drawn attention to a number of passages
of the Synoptic Gospels which imply
preexistence and transcendence,
particularly the use of the phrase "I am
sent" (Mt 15:24; Lk4:43) and "I have
come" (Mt 5:17: 9:13:10:45 :20:28; Mk
2:17 : Lk 5:32). He who receives
the disciples of Jesus receives Jesus
Himself, and he who receives Jesus
receives the one who sent Jesus (Mt
10:40). Jesus compares Himself to the
beloved son sent by his father (Mk
12:6), and presents Himself as
eschatological king and judge (Mt
25:34-40). The greater reserve in the
use of these themes in the Synoptic
Gospels certainly reflects the reserve
of Jesus Himself; but they are not pure
creations of the apostolic Church.
In the epistles Jesus is the Messiah of
the Jews (Rm 9:5; 10:4);In the Johannine
epistles, as in Jn, the confession that
Jesus is the Messiah is the primary
article of faith (1 Jn 2:21; 4:2;5:1).
The Messiah accomplishes His mission
through His suffering and death on
behalf of sinners (Rm 5:6,8;14:9;1 Co
15:3). Paul knows nothing but Christ
crucified (1 Co 1:23; 2:2), and Paul is
crucified with Him (Gal 2:20) as all
Christian must suffer with Him (Rm
8:17). God has reconciled man with
Himself through Christ, indeed God is in
Christ reconciling the world to Himself
(2 Co 5:18f).
Messianism
thus outlined appears as a consistent
development of certain themes and
beliefs which have their origins in
early Israelite religion. It is faith in
the power and will of Yahweh to save and
takes form as Israel learns more clearly
what that power is and how it exercised,
how it is the moving force of history,
and what it means to be "saved". There
is a certain desecularization of an idea
which in its earliest form is rather
social and political than moral and
religious. Through its history Israel
learn that salvation is not achieved
through cultural and political
institutions: Salvation is achieved only
through the intervention of Yahweh, and
since the obstacle to salvation is man's
refusal to accept it, the intervention
frequently takes the form of judgment
Messianism precisely understood, i.e.,
with reference to a personal human agent
of deliverance, brings out the human
factor in deliverance: while it is the
work of Yahweh, it is a work in which
man must share.
While the Messianism of extra biblical
Judaism lies somewhat outside our scope.
It
is necessary to allude to it because it
is presupposed in many NT allusions. As
Messianism is reconstructed from the
apocryphal books, it appears to have
been rather thoroughly secularized into
into a hope of a Jewish empire,
established by intervention of God. This
made it necessary for Jesus to use great
reserve in the employment of Messianism
terms, which refer to royal Messianism.
The Messianic future looked to the
restoration of the kingdom of Israel and
to the consummation of the world. There
is no consistent conception; sometime
the restoration of Israel is followed
immediately by the consummation, at
other times there is no earthly kingdom
of Israel at all, but the entire
messianic consummation is
extraterrestrial. Not infrequently the
earthly kingdom is said to endure 1000
years before the consummation; this idea
passed into early Christian thought.
The nations are judged or
destroyed and Palestine is renewed and
turned into an earthly paradise. The
Messiah Himself is likewise not
consistently understood; but often he is
a preexistent superhuman being who comes
from heaven. He is the conqueror of the
nations and the ruler of the earthly
kingdom. The importance of the
priesthood in later Judaism,
particularly under Hasmonean rule, led
to the conception of two Messiahs, a
Davidic royal Messiah and a priestly
Messiah of Levi or Aaron. This idea,
formerly known in only one apocryphal
book, has now appeared also at Qumran.
On
messianism in the NT cf Church; Israel;
Jesus Christ;Kingdom.
بعض النبؤات التي قيلت في يسوع المسيح
من
العهد القديم وتحققت في شخصه
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1-
الوعد بالمخلص 2- الميلاد 3-
حياة يسوع 4- آلامه وموته 5-
قيامته ومجده
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أ- تك 15:3 "واجعل عداوة
بيتك (الحية) وبين المرأة ونسلها،
فهو يسحق رأسك وانت ترصدين عقبه"
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1- الوعد بالمخلص:
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ب- تك 10:49 "لايزول
الصولجان من يهوذا ولا عصا
القيادة من بين قدميه الى ان يأتي
من تطيعه الشعوب". |
|
|
ج- عدد 17:24/19 "يخرج
كوكب من يعقوب ويقوم صولجان من
اسرائيل.... من يعقوب يخرج سيد
فيهلك كل ناج من عار".
|
|
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د- تث 15:18 "يقيم لك
الرب الهك نبيا مثلي من وسطك ومن
اخوتك، فله تسمعون" (انظر متى
17:5). |
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ﮪ- 2 صموئيل 7: 12 – 13
،16 " سيخرج من نسلك من يبني بيتا
لاسمي واثبت ملكه الى الابد". |
|
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و- اخبار 17: 13، 15 "انا
اكون له ابا وهو يكون لي ابنا
ويكون عرشه ثابتا الى الابد". |
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ز- 2: 6 -7 " اني مسحت
ملكي، قال لي انت ابني واليوم
ولدتك". |
|
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ح- اشعيا 2:4 "في ذلك
اليوم يكون نبت الرب مجدا ". |
|
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اشعيا 7: 14 " ها ان
العذراء تحبل وتلد ابنا وتدعو
اسمه عمانوئيل". |
